Lat. In Roman law. A consideration which is voluntary; that is to say, a gratuitous gift, or such like. It was opposed to onerosa causa, which denoted a valuable consideration. It was a principle of the Roman law that two lucra-tive causes could not concur in the same person as regarded the same thing; that ls to say, that, when the same thing was bequeath-ed to a person by two different testators, he could not have the thing (or its value) twice over. Brown